The investigation, design and implementation of a hierarchical mixed-mode simulator

In principle a mixed-mode simulator allows simultaneous simulation of a circuit at different levels of abstraction in order to reduce the cost of simulation. This project involves the investigation, design and implementation of a hierarchical mixed-mode simulator. A hierarchical logic simulator is designed and coupled with the hierarchical circuit simulator HOMICIDES as one package. This includes issues such as the overall simulator architecture, the representation of signals and scheduling activity. Various factors such as the transformation of signal across the boundaries, the interface macromodels and the data structures required to be used were investigated and implemented. The experimental results obtained using the mixed-mode simulator show that quite accurate results can be obtained and a substantial amount of simulation time can be saved.